Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022)
At Ghost, we’ve won probably hundreds of bids over the years, so we know a thing or two about winning treatments. Today we are giving away our secrets, a homage to the generous spirit of end-of-year Black Friday and Cyber Monday deals, Christmas, and all things advertisers love.
For starters, the best tip we can give you is: winning a treatment has little to do with having better references than the next director. It comes down to something far simpler and far more strategic: showing that your vision is intentional and executable.
Winning a treatment involves many components: competition, budget, timing, the director’s role, and, as usual, luck. But there’s also a pattern to winning or losing a project, and the difference almost always comes down to how well the director communicates their thinking.
A winning treatment does three things:
- It proves you understand the story.
- It proves you understand the brand and the job.
- It proves your aesthetic and style are aligned with it.
Everything else follows from those three.
Let’s break down what consistently wins pitches right now.
1. Take the brief seriously
From experience, directors tend to take the client’s brief and creative deck for granted. But a brief isn’t a suggestion; it’s the client’s worldview.
Value it and embrace it, and you’re already ahead of the competition. We know that a lot of the time the brief kind of sucks. But it’s not the director’s job to fight it, at least not at this stage. You want to win them over.
Once you get the job and the agency is more accustomed to you, you can try to make adjustments more aligned to your vision and style.
On that line of thought, directors who lose pitches tend to have one thing in common: they treat the brief as optional.
A winning director reads the brief like a “detective”: looking for tone, values, intent, red flags, cultural nuance, and pain points. Losing pitches usually come from directors who skim the PDF, pull some pretty images, and call it a day.
The most successful directors I’ve worked with always do one thing before anything else: they articulate the brief back to the treatment team in their own words.
Not just forwarding the PDF, or saying “you know the vibe.”
They show excitement and ownership towards a project. And that feeling is infectious: crew members push harder, designers refine further, writers go all in. The director’s behaviour during the briefing sets the tone all the way to delivery.
Painful but honest tip: if you can’t communicate your vision clearly to your own treatment team, you will not communicate it clearly to the client, no matter how stylish your selects are.
2. Make the agency feel seen
Agencies evaluate the idea, and they evaluate whether you understand the months of groundwork behind it.
When a treatment feels disconnected from the strategic platform, the brand values, or the emotional intention behind the script, agencies feel it immediately.
They also read it as early pushback from the director, and no one likes to work with someone who pushes back all the time, especially when the idea survived endless rounds of client approval.
Winning directors take the agency’s work seriously:
• They treat the character as the brand’s target audience rather than a casting line.
• They reference the product with the same reverence the client has for it.
• They don’t shift the tone into a different universe just because it looks cool.
• They show they understand the underlying logic behind the concept.
This is where a detailed, well-crafted treatment text earns its keep. Detail demonstrates care; it shows the director truly bought into the concept and dived into the script to bring out the best in it for the brand.
Clients notice when you’re speaking their language, and when the emotional rhythm of the writing mirrors the intention of the script.
They definitely notice when performance, pacing, and cinematography all pull in the direction they imagine for the brand.
And when they feel seen, they trust you.
And when they trust you, you win.
What next?
If this resonates with you, we’ll be sharing more deep dives into the craft of treatment writing and design. Tell us which topic you’d like us to explore next.
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